Pewstates
Safety
Net Hospitals Won’t Be
Docked in States That Don’t Expand Medicaid
By Christine Vestal, Staff Writer
Safety
net hospitals – which serve
the majority of Medicaid patients and the uninsured – have feared a big
financial
blow in 2014, especially in states that declined to expand their
Medicaid
programs.
But
the U.S. Department of Health
and Human Services this week indicated they may not be hit as hard as
first
thought.
Instead
of punishing states that
refuse to expand Medicaid, the funding cuts – $500 million in 2014 and
$600
million in 2015—will be allocated among states fairly evenly. The
department
indicated it would follow current guidelines, which call for
proportionally
lower cuts to states with the highest numbers of uninsured residents.
That
includes many of the states that are currently saying “No” to the
expansion.
Texas,
for example, where
Republican Gov. Rick Perry was among the first to announce he would not
support
an expansion of Medicaid, has the highest uninsured rate in the
country.
Because it won’t expand Medicaid, the state’s high uninsured rate will
remain
higher than in states that agreed to expand the program to millions of
low-income adults.
Likewise,
Louisiana, which relies
more heavily on federal hospital subsidies than most states and does
not plan
to expand Medicaid, will see no deeper reductions in federal funding
than
states like California, New York and Maryland that will expand.
The
agency indicated it would
decide later whether to dock states that don’t expand Medicaid when it
allocates much bigger funding cuts slated for 2017 when reductions are
estimated at $1.8 billion, followed by $5.6 billion in 2018...
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